The economics of fossil fuels in a world on fire

Hello. My name is Tzeporah Berman, and I am the International Program. Director of Stand.earth and also the Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. I'm also an adjunct professor at York University. I'm pleased and honored to be speaking to you from the unseated and traditional territories of the Tsleil-Waututh, the Squamish, and the Musqueam first nations here in Vancouver, Canada. I was asked today to give a lecture on the economic arguments for governments and businesses for phasing out fossil fuels.

I've titled this lecture the Economics of Fossil Fuels in a World on Fire in part to point towards the urgency that we're in right now. This year we have seen unprecedented extreme weather, fires, and floods sweeping the globe, and the most recent science delivered by the intergovernmental panel on climate change shows us that we face considerable more both economic and ecological damages and lives lost if we don't mitigate climate change and act quickly. As we review here where we're at and the current challenges, I think it's important to pause for a moment and face the crisis head on. It's hard to do. I sometimes think of it like staring into the sun for an extended period of time. Honestly, my perspective on these issues changed forever because of a chance encounter on the way to the United Nations convention on climate change in Indonesia. On the plane, I had a conversation that changed my life. It forced me to face the crisis head on. I happened to be sitting on the plane next to the chief negotiator for Liberia. He asked me about the issues in my country. I told him about the debates in Canada, especially Ontario over wind farms, in Alberta over the oil sands. His sad smile and words stopped me in my tracks. "It's so nice that you still have time for those discussions", he said. "In my home, people are dying every day because of climate change and thousands more are struggling to get access to water, let alone electricity." He seemed less like a negotiator than a mourner. That was the moment I realized that these are no longer environmental issues. They are economic issues, human rights issues, that I needed to change my work and life to prioritize climate change and our collective response to it. That conversation was 15 years ago.